LAMBRO: Persistent plague of Washington waste

Archaic, bloated, duplicative, wasteful, inefficient government is like the weather. People complain about it, but no one has figured out how to change it.

I took some comprehensive, well-received whacks at the problem in several books in the 1980s, one of which was “Fat City — How Washington Wastes Your Taxes.” It focused on waste and wantonness in more than a hundred agencies, programs and other backwater bureaucracies, costing more than $100 billion a year, that cried out to be terminated, downsized or sold on the auction block.

That was big money then, but it wouldn’t even dent the debt in the Age of Obama, which has been ramping up budget deficits at the rate of more than a trillion dollars a year.

Someone gave Ronald Reagan a copy of “Fat City” at the start of his 1980 presidential campaign, and he began referring to it in his speeches and interviews, and handed out copies at his first Cabinet meeting.

He believed government wasted a lot of the money that Americans sent to the Internal Revenue Service each year and that many of the programs Congress had created over the decades needed to be either abolished, consolidated or cut to the bone.

Not only did he think no one would miss many of these all-but-forgotten agencies, but that the money saved was better left in the wallets and bank accounts of the nation’s businesses and workers, creating jobs, strengthening families and expanding the national economy.

Reagan succeeded in pulling a dispirited nation out of a deep, two-year recession in the early 1980s through his Kennedy-style, across-the-board tax cuts. Unemployment rates fell significantly, the economy soared and tax revenue rose because people were working again.

He also made strides in fighting waste, fraud and abuse through the sweeping Grace Commission reforms, and he managed to curb the budgets of programs here and there. A spendthrift Congress, however, fought his efforts — often to a standstill — every step of the way. Reagan’s combative budget director David Stockman privately expressed deep frustration to this reporter that he hadn’t been able to put more budget-cutting scalps on his belt, and he wasn’t blaming only the Democrats.

Just before he left his post in 1985, Mr. Stockman called me in for an interview. On his desk was a heavily marked-up copy of an article I had written for Washingtonian magazine about where to cut the budget.

“We’ve had a four-year shot at going after all these little mothers, and nobody around here will do it,” he told me. “But the point is, when you go through these things over and over, and you see how embedded the resistance is — and it’s not just big-spending Democrats, it’s Republicans when it comes down to parochial interests — then you realize how insuperable the task is.”

He then went down my list of targets and complained, name by name, how Republican lawmakers had fought him tooth-and-nail to preserve these programs.

That was then. This is now. There is plenty of blame to go around. The government is grotesquely swollen with waste-filled programs and agencies that no longer serve any useful purpose and need to be ended.

It has become much worse under President Obama’s administration. He is interested only in enlarging the size of the government and spending more, as is obvious by a long list of regulatory and social welfare programs he has created or wants to expand.

You could wallpaper every building in the nation’s capital with the pages of countless federal reports on the amount of waste that has been dug up by investigators. That is not a priority on Capitol Hill or in this administration.

Take, for example, a recent Government Accountability Office report that looked into the amount of duplication throughout the government. Among its 345 pages: